Patch 5.2 Dev Interviews
Another day, another interview. Tonight we take a look at an interview with Dave Kosak, Lead Quest Designer by Buffed.de.

Future

There are no more five man dungeons planned for Mists of Pandaria. (Discussion)

Garrosh and Varian will show up again in Patch 5.3, with another chapter of Varian's story.

The rewards from the daily quest factions in patch 5.2 were intended to make daily quests feel less mandatory, with the best rewards coming from raid reputation.

More scenarios are coming in future patches. We may see very challenging three player scenarios with pretty good rewards.

Future patches won't make dramatic changes to Azeroth when the war comes back, but there will be small changes to reflect the war going global.

The story of the last Pandaren emperor that cloaked the continent in mists will be revealed at some point in the future.

An animated ebook is coming that tells more of the story of Pandaria and the last emperor, Shaohao.

The story of the Zandalari isn't over yet!

Patch 5.2

Isle of Thunder unlocking is faction based and participation based. The unlock speed is based on participation percentage, not population. Doing just one quest is enough to count as contributing for the day.

Most realms will fully unlock the Isle within six weeks, with some doing it slightly faster or slower.

The Isle of Thunder has things like the summonable bosses, rare spawns, chests, Lorewalker objects, and other things to make it more than just a place to go and do daily quests. More things like these will be experimented with in Patch 5.3.

The Tiller's farm worked out well, and we may see more places to interact with every day in the future.

The Troves of the Thunder King scenario is intended to be easy to find a key for at least once a week, with a small chance to find another.

Outdoor bosses, rare spawns, and the Isle of Giants are all ways to encourage players to group up, and we will see more in the future.

The solo scenarios added in Patch 5.2 allow players to experience the Isle of Thunder unlock events even if they were unable to play for a few weeks, but we won't see a lot of these in the future. They are better for special events or skill challenges, such as the final part of the Patch 5.2 legendary quest chain.

Isle of Thunder Participation
Dave Kosak shared what the percentage of participation for your faction actually means. Some time towards the end of last week US realms stopped unlocking at the same exact rate, so be sure to encourage your faction to do daily quests if you want to keep up!

Oondasta and Nalak HotfixesGroups of 80 to 200 players have been forming cross realm raids to kill Oondasta, which occasionally caused some realm stability problems.

Originally Posted by Blizzard
(Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

We’re in the process of implementing a hotfix that will remove players’ eligibility to receive loot from Oondasta and Nalak, The Storm Lord if they’re not on their home realm.

We think it’s great that encounters like Oondasta have been able to bring back some of the excitement of massive spontaneous outdoor raids. However, with cross-realm groups giving the ability to play with friends on each other’s realms, the amount of people concentrating on a single realm to try to zerg these bosses down can unfortunately cause a number of stability issues, impacting the availability of the game for everyone.

While Nalak isn’t available yet, we want to preemptively address this so that the first realm to unlock it doesn’t then become the single focus for the rest of the region.

Here’s the hotfix note that’ll be added to the blog shortly:

Players visiting a different realm are no longer eligible to receive loot from Oondasta or Nalak, The Storm Lord.

How do you feel about absorbs always being chosen over other heals in battle and making Paladin and Priest always on top?
It's just a trait of absorbs. Hots also tend to "heal snipe." It's one reason meters aren't a great indicator of healing power. (Source)

Death Knight (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)Sims aren't end all be all, then are you seeing in practice unholy being much higher than frost? Why more frost specific buffs
Yeah Unholy ended up on top and the goal isn't to make every Frost DK swap. Should be personal preference for 95% of players. (Source)

Hunter (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)Can we get the LOS requirement dropped from Dismiss Pet? Would help out when terrain in boss rooms traps them
That seems like a reasonable request. We'll discuss it. Counters a PvP strat, but that strat is mostly annoying. (Source)

But the Silencing Shot nerf IS noticed in PVE, especially with any rares/elites that cast heals. How to interrupt now?
There is no encounter in PvE balanced around every player needing to interrupt that often. (Source)

Confused by Diziet interview and hunter class review. Hunters needed a nerf a la spriests but were in a good place in pvp?
Fixing the Stampede bug after launch and nerfing Silencing Shot a little in 5.2 are the only nerfs IIRC. (Source)

Mage (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
To clear up some confusion, Critical Mass is a 1.3 modifier on live. There is a tooltip bug that makes it appear to be 1.2. Our apologies. (Source)

After a few more days, we now think mage DPS is low. We want to keep parity among mage specs so the buffs will likely be fairly passive. (Source)When will these changes happen? I love arcane, raid leader has me going frost for tomorrows raid. Thank you again for all u do
The intent is before the raid reset / heroics unlock. (Source)

You overdid it destroying Fire & redid it in 5.2 to Arcane. It's galling to see Blizzard surprised Frost is over-represented.
That's not what I said. We like Frost vs. Fire vs. Arcane. We think all 3 are low compared to say lock and hunter. (Source)

I seem to be spamming scorch because of movement issues with the new bosses on ptr, anything new on the way? ;/. Sry to bother
Quickly moving then stopping to cast is generally higher performance than moving all the time and spamming Scorch. (Source)

Speccing Flameglow is boring, there's no visual (and its called flameglow, huh..) It could atleast have a little visual..
It's a passive. The visual would be up 100% of the time. (Source)Can we get an aura to flameglow pls?
It's on always. Do you just want an icon to remind you or do you want to see a visual 100% of the time? (Source)

5.0 fire, 5.1 arcane, 5.2 frost. I feel that when i am comfortable with one spec i have to change every patch since mop releas
My advice overall is to play that you enjoy and not swap constantly based on what some website says. (Source)

Monk (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)Whats the reasoning behind monk fierce tiger hotfix nerf? I understood the 5.2 nerfs but isn't this too many at once?
We found a last minute bug with our testing related to the lvl 30 talents. It as our mistake unrelated to any performance on live. (Source)Does this mean the 10% damage reduction on stance will be reverted? *Puppy Eyes*
No, we had to add that nerf because their damage was 10% higher than we wanted. My apologies. (Source)Any chance of fixing the bug and reverting to 20%? Could cause problems layer. Balancing around bugs = bad.
The bug was in our testing, not the WW. We caught it too late. You were doing +10% DPS than we intended. Sadface. (Source)The excuse doesn't make sentence, dude. How does lv 30 talents affect dps?? Chi wave?
Try measuring your DPS with and without Chi Wave. What is the difference? (Source)How do want to make WW viable? their dmg is lower than in 5.2! srsly people are massabandoning their monks
Mass abandonment after 2 days also seems like a bit of an extreme reaction. (Source)Maybe, although I'm sure it's crossed the mind of several after your such amusing understanding of balance in 5.2.
Are you saying you have a crystal clear picture of balance after 3 days? Hmm. (Source)I just find the explanations for this "10%" reduction a bit reduntant. But im a fighter and so is my monk!
It's not this simple, but imagine Fierce Tiger had a bug that made it do 10% more DPS than intended. The hotfix was to fix that. (Source)

Paladin (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)Why the change to the paladin 4pc pvp set to not work with eternal flame?
We wanted to cut down on Holy instants, so we changed the bonus to work with WoG/EG to Flash. (Source)

Priest (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)Disc feels functionally much better. Coming back with the DA change is tough but adaptable. Overall, great work.
Glad to hear it. Let's see how it feels in a week or two once everyone has wrapped their head around all the PvP changes. (Source)

Shaman (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)Using totems while silenced is annoying ok but to be blanket silenced every 15 seconds isn´t?
The point of silences is to counter things, especially heals and defenses. We don't like uncounterable things. (Source)

Warlock (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)As an Affy Warlock, having Haunt tied into the Soul Shard system feels clunky. It felt better as a cooldown.
We like Haunt. Concerned that Soul Swap consumes all available shards though which means less for other things. (Source)

Any worse on whether Kanrethad might receive some kind of nerf? I've given all I've got, and I just can't do it as-is
Maybe someday. For now, the fight is more about execution and using all your tools than DPS. (Source)

Warrior (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)Why did warriors get such a nerf in 5.2? Why is deadly calm gone? Why such a hate for dps warriors?
Did you really find Deadly Calm fun? I felt we added it in a weak moment. (Source)

Did you guys just not care to put a prot war explanation in the class reviews?
We made almost no changes. We adjusted their scaling a little to avoid high Vengeance craziness. (Source)

I think the Oondasta change was to stop the kills from happening the way they were. Its meant to be a difficult boss that 40 or so heroic raiders take down, not a boss that 3-400 people zerg and corpserun for.

I think the Oondasta change was to stop the kills from happening the way they were. Its meant to be a difficult boss that 40 or so heroic raiders take down, not a boss that 3-400 people zerg and corpserun for.

even still, doesn't make sense to release the harder one before the intended easier one

I guess leveling my Mage may turn out to be a good thing. Playing Elemental Shaman until I can switch over to my mage. Ele is doing well right now, but with better gear, I'm sure Mage will quickly surpass it.

When I tried to create a raid of 10 people on a specific server (say a pvp server), it often throws us on another, different pve server (some of us are on pve servers), as if we have no control over what server we want to CRZ on.

So high pop servers win again. They can get 10 40m groups of corpserun baddies together and zerg the boss while dead servers get to just look at how pretty he is.
EDIT: I'm on a high pop btw, just feel bad for them.

So high pop servers win again. They can get 10 40m groups of corpserun baddies together and zerg the boss while dead servers get to just look at how pretty he is.
EDIT: I'm on a high pop btw, just feel bad for them.

I have one toon on a low pop and one on high pop and only the toon on the high pop will get to kill a world boss on a weekly basis.

When I tried to create a raid of 10 people on a specific server (say a pvp server), it often throws us on another, different pve server (some of us are on pve servers), as if we have no control over what server we want to CRZ on.

The majority of people in the raid have to be on your server; let's say you have 10 people from your server. If you invite 11 people from another server, you will be CRZ'ed to their server.

Originally Posted by Lezarin

in a way you need to keybind for serious pvp it seems as by the time you clicked in arena the opposing team has used and abused your body your team and shaved the cat too.

Arcane blast increased by 800% that made me laugh. Just imagine the damage that would cause :P People would flip. haha Though mages needs some buffs not crazy but to a point where we are on par with the locks.